There’s a band for every mood. Cigarettes After Sex is for melancholy; White Denim is for summer nights; Linkin Park is for releasing anger like a teenager. But for the days when I can’t decipher quite what I feel, something pliable, more transcendent, is required.
Most often, it’s Joy Division: music to flail around or lie on the floor to, music that’s ecstasy and sorrow – mournful yet with a persistent, pulsing energy. It was pleasingly familiar to hear Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood searching for the words to express this contradiction in Transmissions: The Definitive Story, a new podcast about the band. “A lot of the music in the Eighties… was kind of dark and nasty,” he says, “but that was something else, that was sort of shimmery as well as bleak.”
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